There are billions of people on the earth who live without access to reliable electricity. Even a modest amount of electrical power can tremendously improve the quality of life for people in under-served regions. Basic applications in these rural areas could include items such as lighting, medical, and health related items such as refrigeration for medicines and food.
While the use of petroleum-based resources to generate electrical power is a possibility, petroleum-based resources have environmental issues, concerns as non-renewable resources, and the logistics of getting the petroleum-based resources from the source to the area of need. Renewable energy technologies including solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, geothermal, tidal, wind and others offer the hope of renewable resources local to the area needing power. In addition, these renewable energy technologies are inherently scalable and lend themselves to the potential of eliminating the need for a power grid. However, these renewable energy technologies generally need a storage mechanism to store energy in that they are not capable typically of varying output based on need. In addition, many of these technologies are cyclical in nature such as photovoltaic where the output from the energy source drops essentially to zero at night.
One method of storing the energy is a regenerative electrolyzer/fuel cell system. However, existing regenerative electrolyzer/fuel cell systems have several short-comings including the large size of storage tanks to hold sufficient gas for the fuel cell.